Sujāta Jātaka

Jataka No. 306 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha to settle a quarrel between Queen Mallika and King Pasenadi, the royal couple of Kosala and contemporaries of the Buddha in his own lifetime. He drew on an old story of a king and a jujube-seller to help the two find their way back to one another with less pride standing between them.

In Benares, during the reign of King Brahmadatta, a young woman, the daughter of a fruit-seller, walked past the palace with a basket of jujubes on her head, calling out her wares. The king, standing at an open window above the court, fell in love at the sound of her voice. She did not enter the royal court; she simply passed by it, and the king's heart was won at once. When he learned that she was unmarried, he made her his chief queen and honored her greatly, so that a fruit-seller's daughter came to hold the highest place in the household.

Sujata now lived among silk and attendants, far from the lanes where she had once walked with her basket. The Bodhisatta, the Buddha himself in an earlier birth, stood by as the king's minister, counselor in both worldly and spiritual matters.

One day the king sat eating jujubes from a golden dish. Queen Sujata asked him what the fruit was, describing it as a pretty red fruit shaped like an egg. The king himself had raised her to the queen's seat, and the dish of jujubes lay between them on the table, an ordinary moment on which the whole quarrel would turn.

The king grew angry. He called her a fruit-seller's daughter and asked whether she did not recognize the fruit of her own family. In two verses he reminded her that she had once gathered jujubes bare-headed and poorly dressed, without any shame, and said that pride had taken hold of her. He ordered her to go back and gather jujubes again, for she would no longer be his wife.

The Bodhisatta judged that no one but himself could reconcile the two. He spoke a single verse to the king: such faults, he said, are common in a woman raised to high rank, so the king should forgive her and let go of his anger, since it was he who had made her great.

The king accepted the minister's counsel. He pardoned the queen's offence and restored her to her former position, and from then on the two lived in harmony. A quarrel that had begun with one plain question ended in a household at peace.

The Buddha closed the story by returning it to Mallika and Pasenadi. He named the king of Benares as the king of Kosala, Sujata as Mallika, and the wise minister as himself. A king's anger, however it may seem justified in the moment, is better softened by remembering that he himself raised the one he blames.

The quarrel was never really about the jujubes. It began with one innocent question and grew through a hard reproach, and it ended when a counselor reminded the king of his own part in the queen's rise.

In the telling, the king needs two verses to voice his reproach, while the Bodhisatta answers with just one, a measure of how little it took to turn the quarrel. He did not rebuke the king for his temper, and he did not demand anything of the queen. He asked the king to see her faults as the common failing of one raised suddenly to high rank, and to remember that he had made her great. That reminder was enough to turn the king from anger back to pardon, and in the same way the story was offered to Mallika and Pasenadi in their own quarrel.